The Nobel Peace Prize committee has added another surprise to its recent lists of winners. The 2017 Prize was awarded to a little known group with a big ambition. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons of Switzerland, known as Ican, has a single accomplishment, of arguable value. Interestingly, Ican's success in putting together a UN-approved treaty to ban nuclear weapons had a catalyst that almost all reports of the the Nobel Prize ignored: Thailand.
The Ican work to draw up a treaty and get it through the United Nations is undeniable. It resulted just three weeks ago in the first signatures on the "Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons". Fifty nations signed on Sept 20. Just three have ratified it -- Guyana, the Vatican and Thailand.
While Ican's Nobel-cited part in bringing in the treaty is undeniable, an extremely quiet effort by Thailand got it to the signature stage. As this column has previously reported, Ambassador to the UN Thani Thongphakdi was a prime organiser of the effort to write and pass the treaty. This took almost a year, and most of the work was done at the UN headquarters in Geneva, not at the General Assembly or Security Council in New York. Neither the Ministry of Foreign Affairs nor the government has taken the deserved public credit.
It is a strange treaty, and it brings up once again the sometimes inexplicable awards of the Nobel Peace Prize. On occasion, such as last Friday's announcement, the prize committee veers far from its past awards of rewarding people and groups that had real accomplishments and achievements. Writing and passing the anti-nuclear treaty was a bureaucratic victory, but it has no effect on world citizens or on actual attempts to bring about nuclear disarmament. In fact, every nuclear power, every nuclear-protected country and every nuclear-ambitious country such as North Korea was banned from negotiating the treaty.
Last year's Nobel Peace Prize winner was Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who negotiated a peace agreement that halted a civil war that cost 220,000 of his citizens' lives. The 2015 winners, colourfully but accurately described as the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet, prevented a terrible war. Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai and Indian activist Kailash Satyarthi, the 2014 laureates, fought successfully to bring education to children, especially girls.
The recognition of Ican's anti-nuclear campaign is no doubt welcome, and will encourage talk, and perhaps action against nuclear weapons. In the current atmosphere of a dangerous Donald Trump-Kim Jong-un propaganda battle, that may prove important.
There were, however, so many worthy nominees for the Peace Prize this year. Favourites Mohammad Javad Zarif and Federica Mogherini, the Iranian and European Union foreign ministers respectively, negotiated the landmark deal that slowed and perhaps prevented Tehran's nuclear ambitions. The White Helmets of Syria have shown enormous selflessness while saving thousands from bombing attacks. High-profile candidates were the UNHCR and Pope Francis. Among the least famous, unfortunately, is the Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, sentenced to 10 years in jail and 1,000 lashes for "insulting Islam" while living under a brutal and repressive regime.
While there are plenty of critics of the 2017 award, it represents recognition of a growing threat. This is not restricted to Messrs Trump and Kim, but for now, North Korea's Dear Leader is the only one to have directly threatened to use nuclear weapons -- and is encouraging his citizens with massive propaganda to agree with such outlandish and parlous speech. The Ican Peace Prize award will force many more people to consider and reject such threats.